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Canada's Donna Strickland becomes third female winner of Nobel Prize for Physics

Professor Dr. Donna Strickland speaks during a news conference at the University of Waterloo to field questions about her shared Nobel Prize in Physics, October 2, 2018 in Waterloo, Canada. (AFP)

Canada's Donna Strickland of the University of Waterloo became only the third woman to win a Nobel for physics on Tuesday, October 2, after Marie Curie in 1903 and Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963.

Donna Strickland, Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo and winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics poses for a photo during a celebration with colleagues and students in Waterloo, Ontario on October 2, 2018. (AFP)

An American and French scientist share the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics for breakthroughs in laser technology that have turned light beams into precision tools for everything from eye surgery to micro-machining.

Strickland is the first female Nobel laureate in any field in three years. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said last year it would seek to more actively encourage nominations of women researchers to begin addressing the imbalance.

Her win comes a day after Europe's physics research center CERN suspended an Italian scientist, Alessandro Strumia, for telling a seminar at the organization's Swiss headquarters last week that physics was "invented and built by men".

The inventions by the three scientists date back to the mid-1980s and over the years they have revolutionized laser physics.

The prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace have been awarded since 1901 in accordance with the will of Swedish business tycoon Alfred Nobel, whose discovery of dynamite generated a vast fortune used to fund the prize.

Physics is the second of this year's crop of prizes and comes after the medicine prize was awarded on Monday for discoveries about how to harness and manipulate the immune system to fight cancer.


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